Chasing the Dragon (38 page)

Lila walked out of the epicentre along the road towards the
Ahriman Manse. The sword, in one piece, lay at her back on a makeshift belt. She neither looked right nor left, nor at the ground, as she
stepped over the increasingly large piles of debris in her way as she
passed through the concentric rings of her destruction. In her wake
groaning demons began to pick themselves up and the less stunned of
the small creatures dragged themselves to shelter. At the last second
she'd decided against holding the weapons in her hands. A little bit
less was a whole lot more.

She made her way steadily, ignoring everyone. When the attacks
came, as they must, she parried them with necessary force, but she
never slackened or speeded her pace or altered her direction even in one
degree. These were not significant attacks or else she would never have
been able to stage-manage herself so well. They were merely opportune
assaults hastily made in case she were weaker than she appeared, almost
a demon welcome of a kind.

By the time she reached the house, having telegraphed her arrival
and intentions so clearly, there was a small posse waiting for her. The
steady pelting of missiles-everything from soft fruit to gunshotceased abruptly. The demons in front of her were all large and
imposing. They dwarfed her in size, except for the central figure, who
was slight but made up for stature by the brooding malevolence of his
presence, an energy that was sufficiently powerful to make her feel like
turning around and going home, though she didn't.

Viza was the master of the Law. His accompanying creatures were
the Instruments of Justice. She recognised them from a quick study of
the latest photographs from the agency files. They had no exact
authority to prevent her entering her own house, but she stopped as a
mark of respect to hear them out in the hope that she wouldn't have to
fight them.

"Welcome back, Friendslayer," Viza said. He was almost human
looking, save for his strangely extended skull and the talons he bore
instead of fingers. "I trust you are here to execute justice upon your
husband?"

"If you can point me at him," Lila said lightly, "I'll be out of your
hair."

At this Viza's already significant darkness deepened and the light
dimmed around them all. "Alas, I was hoping that you knew his
whereabouts."

"I'm here to find him," she said. "Do you have any helpful knowledge you might share with me?"

"All say he is within the city, and that is all."

"Okay. I'll start with this house and then I'll search the city then,"
Lila said, a model of civil compliance and practicality.

"We have searched all the properties not directly controlled by
your ... family interests ... so you may ignore those," Viza replied
smoothly. "Perhaps you would take one of my assistants with you on
your task to verify

"I don't think so." She knew she had no obligation. He was simply
hoping to prey on her inexperience of demon affairs and win her over
with civility, which she was reasonably sure he didn't feel. That made
elbowing aside the dregs of her natural politeness much easier. She
lowered her chin fractionally and maintained a powerful position,
unblinking. "Stand aside."

He had no choice, though she could see it irked him deeply. The
black miasma of his spread energy clotted and became flakey, like negative snow; then he gave her the merest nod of acceptance-the only
concession to her authority he could bear-and twitched himself to his
left so that she could pass them and enter the house.

The hall was crowded with demons of all shapes and sizes, none of
which she recognised except the Ahrimani servants who wore a purple
sash around their garish colours. These immediately ran to her and
were first to prostrate themselves, facedown on the floor, quickly followed by most of the others present. Those who didn't flatten bowed
deeply. The slowest was a tall, horned, and tusked demon like a centaur, with a dappled, wet-looking skin. His face struggled to compose
itself around the many outgrowths of fang and horn but he did lower
it to her. She guessed he must be a significant member of one of the
houses Teazle had most outrageously acquired.

"Get me maps and inventory of everything we own," Lila said,
walking through the way that parted for her as if it were the sea
parting at the foot of a saint. "And send the vassals of all the newly
sequestered families to me in the war room." She didn't acknowledge anyone with even a glance and proceeded through the house in the
same way, acquiring detailed information from all her machine senses
as she passed. The basic features hadn't altered, though there were
many more of the lesser immediate family in residence and signs of
great spending having gone on in their previously seldom-visited
apartments. Even the fish pools sparkled with jewels cast carelessly
into their tiled shallows.

Besides family, a lot of whom Lila supposed must be friends and
relations were about the place, trying not to crowd to see her, bowing,
ingratiating, backing off, spouting greetings of enormously overblown
grandeur, and trying to foist trinkets on her. She strode by as if they
did not exist, and if they got too close she made no effort to avoid
them, even treading on one particularly greasy individual who was
trying to stop her, scraping and bowing backwards with some whiny
petition about an unfairness in the distribution of wealth gained by the
family. However, the servants at least had some of their heads on
straight and made sure that the war room was pristine and ready for
her arrival, with onlookers and hopefuls corralled to the halls on either
side, as she reached the head of the vast staircase that led to its frescoed
and vaulted magnificence.

She'd only ever been shown this room by Zal after they'd been married, as part of her grand tour of the house, and remembered its heavy
black grandeur, set off by a magnificent set of stained-glass windows that
wouldn't have disgraced a cathedral, although the subject matter of various Ahrimani engaged in acts of torture, slayage, and sex might have.

At that time she hadn't been head of the family or anywhere near it.
Zal was an adoptee, through love, by Sorcha, who was herself only one
of thirty children of the matriarch's sister's marriages. Zal wasn't
counted lesser, but he was only a minor authority with some seventy or
more individuals before him in line to the ascension. The fact that the
house itself was the second-largest power unit in Demonia was what
had given him so much kudos. However, Teazle was the direct heir of his own house, Sikarza. They had married, and that had yanked Zal and
Lila up the ranks of the Ahriman wannabes about forty places. Further
ascent waited only on some longevity to their match; time and goodwill needed to be established, and then more would follow in due
course as both houses made the most of their fresh alliance. However,
once Teazle had killed his mother, they had reached direct heir position
themselves, seeing as they were wed to the head of an allied house. Only
Zhadrakor Ahriman counted higher. But since then Teazle had gone on
his monster mission to rule all of Demonia, as a side effect of his mission to help Lila, and that had pushed the whole Ahriman house into
the shade of his glory. As his spouse and the only available member of
their union, this made Lila head of the entire empire he had fashioned.
She had greatly honoured Ahrimani by making this her base, elevating
its ranks instantly to equal position with Sikarza once again as overlords
of the civilised world. They owed her big-time. The Ahrimani stood to
lose a lot in Zal's absence, though his death was unproven. Her reemergence had renewed all that had been lost in the fifty years since they had
gone. Coupled with Teazle's reign of terror, it put her in a supreme
position. Plus she didn't want to start out by flushing the Sikarzas
through with blood since many of them no doubt would be the keenest
rivals for her position. That might be messy, with too many possibilities for a mistake. She had to come here, and she had to make them all
come to her and establish her superiority immediately and absolutely.
Yes, as she reached the throne at the head of the vast ebony horseshoe
table and sat down in its ugly gothic nest of snakes, skulls, and skeletons, she felt in charge, confident of her decisions and out of her comfort zone by a factor of approximately a thousand.

The bikini gleamed with approval of the entire scheme. She placed
the huge sword down in front of her on the tabletop and removed her
hands from it.

The servants took this as a cue that they might creep forwards with
an intent to place drinks, food, treats, and baskets of solid-gold fruit about the place as some kind of warming welcome. Lila dismissed them
all with a wave. Gifts were toadying. Even a glass of water would be
grovelling to them too much. They got nothing. She took a drink for
herself in an ostentatious etched glass and placed it next to the sword.

Vilifi, the Ahriman majordomo, a thin humanoid demon of spectral properties who had been housekeeper when she was last there,
drifted to a position just behind her and asked what they ought to do
with the items. She sensed a key moment. If she admitted responsibility for this, he would plague her with decisions every second of the
day and she would get nowhere. It would be weak.

She raised one armoured finger in a laissez-faire manner and let it
fall to signify she couldn't care less but that he had better not bother
her with such trivia again. He wasn't in his position for nothing.
Demons loved subtle command. Whatever he made of it the servants
holding the decorations melted away silently, leaving the guard,
looking rather desperate to be curious but even more desperate not to
be, and Vilifi himself, who blended with the shadows cast by the vast
drapes at the stained-glass windows. As an afterthought she had all the
other chairs removed from the room so that she could better claim the
entire table and, by extension, any business, for herself. She seemed
decently alone as the first of her subordinate house leaders arrived.

She was a fire demon, blazing with live flame, six armed and black
eyed, and as soon as she had a clear sight line she flung her chest forward and a lance of white-hot fire moving at slightly less than the
speed of sound shot directly at Lila's chest.

The sword leapt off the table, transformed itself into a whirling
grey shield of strange vortices, and consumed the flame. In dismay the
demon repowered her attack, using more energy, trying to push the
grey anomaly backwards. She opened her cone to let the fire flow
around the sides and get Lila that way. The grey disc bent the fire into
itself. Then, as if it had lost patience, it turned on its side like a
whirling circular saw blade and sped down the line of fire, eating as it went, spinning itself up to the demon and scattering her in a blitz of
tiny smoking pieces all around the room. Her shriek of shock broke a
window and the drapes began to smoulder.

Lila hadn't had to move. The sword re-formed itself and was back on
the table, in its makeshift holder, before anyone had time to draw breath.
It moved so fast that the other demons who had arrived weren't sure
what had happened. Vilifi appeared at that moment with the records she
had requested on a box full of scrolls. She tried not to lose her temper at
the archaic things and reached casually for the first of them.

"Get me the heir," she said aloud, opening the scroll. "And make
it quick. I haven't got all day."

The air became poisonous as another demon used the moment of
her distraction to chance his luck. Clouds of vile toxins appeared as if
from nowhere. As they touched her skin she felt her body react,
analysing, manufacturing counteragents, issuing chemistry to prevent
the damaging effects from causing lasting harm to her nerves, though
she was soon immune to what would have killed an ordinary human
on first contact.

Lila yawned and began to speed-read the scrolls, taking them,
opening them, flicking them out to full length for a glance, and then
leaving them on the floor. Her arms moved so fast they were a blur.

The sword became a spinning sphere of white cloud. It vacuumed
up the filthy air and poured fresh, clean, ionised air in its place, darting
around as fast as thought so they could only see it when it paused.
Plagues followed, diseases so virulent and aggressive that they killed
several delegates. The cloud spawned microclouds of bacteria, viruses,
and phages of its own.

There was a brief, epic microparasitic war that lasted three generations for the minuscule protagonists, and then the cloud re-formed
itself into a thin, clear film and wrapped itself around the body of the
blight demon who had thought he would murder Lila until there was
no air left for him. He struggled briefly against it, thrashing as he tried to tear it, but it was a complete membrane. Then it sucked out all the
remaining gas and free molecules, and water.

Lila and the remaining living demons who were lying about in various states of recovery were able to watch as he was shrink-wrapped
inexorably to death, shrivelling, withering, shrinking until at last he
gave up and petrified. As the film unwrapped itself and spun back to
the table, a sword again, he was left lying where he'd fallen, twisted
and flattened as if the bindings were still there, his face horrified and
enraged. He was about the size of a wastebasket, Lila noted as servants
of the house appeared, picked him up, and carried him off.

"And that one," she said. She tossed down the final scroll and
reached to take up her glass of wine, had a sip, and placed it back down
delicately on the table. "Any more before I begin?"

But although she was certain others had come with her death
already a certainty in their minds they didn't offer to make it so. Four
had died in the poisoning and two of the diseases. Their stone remains
were also removed to be returned to the family homes, and couriers
could be heard winging off from the dispatch balcony to demand the
attendance of the new regents.